


skeleton touch and pumpkin glow

by moonix



Series: ghouls just wanna have fun (the blackwood series) [1]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - No Exy (All For The Game), Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Autumn, Body Horror, But it's like? Lowkey?, M/M, Neil is some kind of supernatural being, Sandwiches, Small Towns, Spooky, Teenage boys eat a lot but supernatural creatures eat more, Witch Andrew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 03:34:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20735570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix
Summary: Neil is a supernatural being who’s been haunting the town of Blackwood in general and Andrew's cottage in particular. Andrew decides to do something about it and it backfires in unexpected ways.





	skeleton touch and pumpkin glow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [exybee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exybee/gifts).

> This can be read as a sort of witchy prequel to [ghost eyes and candy apple mouths](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20508695) or they can both be read as standalones which just happen to use the same setting. I hadn't planned this yet when I wrote ghost eyes so it might not be 100% compatible. My pal Bee just keeps throwing ideas at me for this and I'm honestly just rolling with it because I love it :D Might write more for this verse once I'm not so hideously busy with work anymore... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

There were waffles for breakfast that morning. Nicky always made waffles when he wanted to have a serious talk; the fluffier the waffles, the more serious the talk.

“So,” Nicky said once Andrew had his mouth full. “Is everything alright at school?”

“Mm,” Andrew said, chewing slowly. Nicky had gone a little overboard with the cinnamon and it left a sharp aftertaste on his tongue.

“How are your classes?” Nicky tried a different angle. He’d learned by now that asking the twins yes or no questions usually got him exactly that, and if he wanted a more in-depth answer he had to rephrase them.

“Boring,” Andrew gave him for this one. He chased a syrupy, slippery slice of apple around his plate with his fork, then put it down. “What’s this really about?”

“I,” Nicky faltered. “Well, I’m worried about you, that’s all. The mouse incident…”

“Wasn’t me,” Andrew said, not for the first time. Leaving a dead mouse outside Nicky’s bedroom door where Nicky would step on it in the morning wasn’t his idea of fun, especially because Nicky had woken him up with his ear-shattering shriek. Nicky had had to go next door to soothe his offended sensibilities with some of Erik’s homemade spiced mead while Aaron disposed of the mouse. For all his many failures and shortcomings, Aaron at least wasn’t squeamish about death, which was handy, because it meant Andrew could sneak into the morgue where Aaron did his apprenticeship any time he wanted.

“Then why did you dig it back out of the compost?” Nicky asked, distressed.

“To look at it,” Andrew said truthfully. “For a project.”

“Well, I doubt your teachers intended for you to carry dead mice around for a project,” Nicky sniffed. “And what about the other incidents?”

“I didn’t leave the windows open during that storm,” Andrew said, also not for the first time. “And I wasn’t even home when that shelf fell over.”

“Yeah, because you were skipping school,” Nicky said darkly. “Andrew, I’m not saying you were responsible for all of it, I just… is there anything you want to tell me? Anything that’s bothering you? I’m on your side, you know. I want to know if there’s a problem so I can try and fix it with you.”

“You can’t,” Andrew blurted out before he could censor himself. There was a hard silence that seemed to crunch in his ears like frost under his boots and Andrew looked down at the last smear of syrup on his plate before pushing it away. “I have to go, I’m late for school.”

“Not like you usually care about that,” Nicky muttered under his breath, but didn’t stop him on his way out the door. Andrew grabbed his jacket, stuffed some of the acorns lying in a decorative bowl on the hallway cabinet into his pockets and walked out into the brisk wind.

-

He had Aaron to thank for the body parts. He wouldn’t _actually_ thank Aaron, of course; mainly because they didn’t do that, but also because Aaron didn’t technically know that Andrew had taken his badge and sneaked into the morgue again. He’d been too preoccupied with the maggots crawling all over last night’s leftover pizza to notice Andrew pickpocketing him.

Andrew, personally, thought that the maggots were pretty interesting. He’d considered taking the carton outside to get a closer look at them, but Aaron and Nicky were still convinced he was up to something sinister after the latest string of “incidents”.

They didn’t know enough to call them what they were—a mild case of haunting, too benign to be classified as a proper harrowing, which Andrew would have been more intrigued to observe. It was, however, getting to the point where it was inconveniencing him, so Andrew was going to do something about it.

He’d planned the ritual meticulously. It was a little more challenging than what he usually got up to, which at least meant it would keep his interest for longer. Andrew was constantly torn between his inherent laziness and his insatiable boredom; if he wanted entertainment, he had to create it for himself at the cost of making an effort.

His supplies were packed into his bag and he’d taken care of all the necessary preparations. Now he just had to find whatever was doing the haunting, preferably in some secluded spot where none of the nosy villagers would stumble across him and kick up a fuss about the dead things in his bag.

Or worse, try to make conversation.

The old cemetery was his first stop. It was a blustery September morning, alternating sweet bites of sunlight with the bitter tang of clouds, and Andrew pulled his beanie low against the occasional spray of raindrops. The cemetery was a peaceful place, the grass tousled with weeds ever since people had stopped tending to the graves, graffiti growing here and there like abandoned wildflowers. It was probably the least haunted place in the entire town, and Andrew left it in a bad mood, kicking an empty can into the shrubbery on his way out and leaving the gate open on purpose.

Something brushed past his legs as he walked back down the hill, but when he looked down it was only a cat. It looked mangy and skinny, like it was made from stalks of wheat. In the blink of an eye, it disappeared again along with the breeze.

He tried the newer cemetery next, but it was far too neat and well-kept, and an old lady watering shrivelled-up flowers shot him suspicious looks for being out of school this early in the morning. The rain picked up suddenly, whisked into a frenzy by the wind, and Andrew decided to take a break and regroup.

“Algebra today, is it?” Bee greeted him as he walked into the café, the tinkle of the bell muffled by the noise of the storm that pressed inside with him. It irked him that she knew his timetable and could always tell when he was meant to be in class, but at least she never tried to make him go.

“Oh, Bee,” Andrew said, tapping a display case filled with honey cakes. “You know I have better things to do than math.”

“How about a Blackwood Fog, then?” Bee suggested. “Seems like a day for it.”

“Seems like,” Andrew agreed. She plated up a honey cake for him and steamed milk for his drink. He hadn’t yet figured out what exactly was in it—his last guess had been pears and vanilla, but Bee had only smiled mysteriously and declined to confirm or deny.

He took his tea and cake to the window seat with the antique wing chair. It was upholstered in scuffed champagne velvet and provided a comfortable protection against the draft spilling in through the door every time someone came in, as well as a view across the rain-swept street outside. Andrew took out his notebook to doodle as he sipped his tea and watched the few passersby struggle against the wind.

The umbrella he drew turned itself inside-out on the page. The stray cat he’d seen earlier escaped from the tip of his pencil the moment it was done and curled up behind the shelter of the dog-eared page corner. A leaf blew across the entirety of the notebook, settling at last on the inside of the leather-bound cover.

When he looked back up, a blurry figure in a scuffed, oversized jacket was standing across the street, heedless of the driving rain. Their head was covered by a hood and Andrew couldn’t see their eyes, but he felt like they were staring straight at him. A movement out of the corner of his eye drew his attention for a second, and when he tried to focus on the figure again, the street was empty.

“Gotcha,” he muttered under his breath and flipped through his notebook until he found the map of Blackwood that he’d painstakingly spent his last Geography class compiling. For some annoying reason all of the maps of Blackwood that were publically available were from at least three decades ago, and Google Street View always froze when trying to zoom in on individual streets. Nicky had laughed about it their first day when they discovered that neither their street nor their new house, Crabapple Cottage, had existed yet in 1921.

Andrew pencilled in a little circle just outside the Honey Pot to mark his first viewing of the ghost, or demon, or ghoul, or whatever it was. Their house was probably his safest bet in tracking it down, but it also usually contained Aaron or Nicky or both of them and sometimes also Erik and his dog, which made it rather difficult to prepare and perform an intricate ghost-trapping ritual there.

As soon as the rain eased up, Andrew packed his things back into his bag, grabbed one of Bee’s cheese and mustard sandwiches to go and followed the ghost’s trail, tracing it to a nearby pumpkin patch with the help of his pendulum. From there, he had to hike up the path that led to the Pie Hole, a rustic-looking eatery specialising in pies that was popular with tourists and locals alike. The savoury smells drifting out through the open kitchen window made it hard to discern the _something_ that indicated a supernatural presence, and Andrew lost some time tromping through the wet grass and mud until he picked it up again. Another stray cat, this one shiny black like a raven, followed him around for a while as he crisscrossed through the market stalls in the town square, passed the little pizza shop that Nicky always ordered from because the delivery guy was “cute”, and finally came to a stop just on the outskirts of town, underneath a half-rotten apple tree that still defiantly carried fruit.

Andrew looked around and pulled a small red apple from a withered branch that showered him in raindrops. The apple smelled sweet and fresh as he polished it against his sleeve. What little light was left had started to yellow and fade like old lace after the storm, and Andrew bit into the apple to free his hands for unpacking his bag.

The body parts smelled of chemicals more than corpses as he arranged them on an old blanket. A few stubby, mismatched candles provided only dim, erratic little sources of light that were mostly blotted out by the waxing dusk. Mouse and rabbit bones made hollow sounds as he shook them out, the entrails he smeared on the sockets of the lifeless limbs along with a paste of crushed herbs, beeswax and dead leaves.

There were more cats now, lurking in the shadows and watching Andrew set up. Now that he was doing it, he didn’t feel like following the exact steps in their right order anymore; his hands worked on instinct. At last he tossed the apple core into the empty ribcage that he’d salvaged from a deer carcass a while ago, tore his map from his notebook and laid it out on the blanket, fixing it in place with moss-covered stones. Little circles marked the places he’d traced the ghost to today, with a big one lingering over the gnarled apple tree that still felt weighed down by more than just fruit.

“There,” Andrew said to no one in particular. “All done.”

One of the cats came forward as if summoned and curled up on the blanket. Two more followed, but they didn’t feel wrong, so Andrew left them there. He couldn’t remember the spell he needed—which was odd, he always remembered everything—but it didn’t seem so important anymore, so he just closed his eyes and let whatever words were necessary come and go. The candle flames seemed to brighten behind his eyelids, casting a warm glow. Even though it was cold and wet and dark outside now, Andrew felt perfectly cosy where he was.

He felt like going to sleep, so he did.

-

He woke to the distant rumble of thunder and the cold leftovers of yesterday’s rain. The blanket underneath him was sodden but otherwise bare and the candles had snuffed themselves out at some point. Above him, stale, weak sunlight sat in the branches of the tree like cold tea in a cup, and all the apples had turned brown and mouldy overnight.

Andrew sat up, wincing at the crick in his neck, and found a naked, dew-covered boy sitting in the dead grass.

“Oh, rats,” the boy said darkly. “I was starting to think you’d never wake up, so I ate your sandwiches.”

“Well, sorry to disappoint,” Andrew said, clearing the cobwebs from his voice. He hadn’t actually made any plans for what to do _after_ the ritual, but naked boys and sandwiches probably wouldn’t have been on the list anyway.

“They were good,” the naked boy said. “Can we get more?”

“Clothes first,” Andrew muttered. The boy didn’t seem particularly bothered about being naked, even though he had a lot of scars and bruises. Andrew’s own scars were always carefully hidden under his clothes, and when he’d first found Aaron, there had been a lot of bruises hidden carefully under clothes as well.

He dug around in his bag until he found the spare pair of Aaron’s scrubs that he’d worn to the morgue and handed them to the boy, who pinched and plucked clumsily at the fabric like he was looking for something, then seemed to get intensely fascinated by the fact that he had toes.

“Problem?” Andrew asked.

The boy bared his teeth, then pursed his lips. They were nice lips—or rather, they weren’t nice; chapped to all hell and somewhat uneven, but Andrew could still imagine kissing them.

“I’ve never had a body before,” the boy said with his kiss-nice lips. “It’s not as easy as it looks.”

“I suppose not,” Andrew agreed. “Do you need help?”

He motioned to the scrubs and the boy held them out to him. Andrew took the shirt and helped him into it, holding it cautiously so as not to jostle his bruises. The boy didn’t seem to mind, though his stomach growled loudly when they were done.

“Can we get sandwiches now?”

“Not yet,” Andrew said, picking up the trousers. “Do you have a name?”

“Hmm,” the boy said, wriggling his toes against the dirt. That way they reminded Andrew of the maggots on Aaron’s pizza, and he understood the boy’s fascination with them. “I don’t like it much.”

“A nickname, then?”

The boy thought for a moment while Andrew manoeuvred him to his feet. Andrew was careful to only grip his shirt, but the boy immediately leaned on him with no regard for his still semi-clothed state.

“Neil,” he decided. “You can call me Neil.”

-

“Fancy seeing you out on a Saturday,” Bee grinned as Andrew pushed open the door to the café. It was still early and the Honey Pot wasn’t technically open yet, but Bee liked to get everything ready and have a quiet cup of tea by herself in the mornings.

“It’s an emergency,” Andrew told her.

“Ah,” Bee said wisely. “Rocky Road Horror it is, then.”

She turned away to prepare the hot chocolate, which was swirled with salted caramel and topped with marshmallows, caramelised nuts, pretzel bites and more caramel. Neil stared at the array of sandwiches and cakes in the display case and reached out, making a smudge on the sparkling clean glass with his thumb, and Andrew quickly wiped it off with his sleeve.

“Sandwiches, too,” he said when Bee handed him the two mugs. She nodded and hummed, piling some of each onto a large plate painted with pumpkins and leaves. Neil’s stomach growled again as he took the plate, and by the time they sat down in the window seat, Neil had already polished off two of the sandwiches.

“What are these?” Neil asked through a mouthful of bread.

“Honey bacon.”

“And the other ones?”

“Egg and cress, cheese and mustard,” Andrew said, pointing at the quickly diminishing sandwiches in turn. “And grilled vegetables.”

“Yeah, I don’t like those,” Neil said, pulling a face.

“Yet you still ate them,” Andrew muttered, bemused.

“Which ones are we trying next?”

Neil licked the honey from his fingers and looked longingly at the display case, behind which Bee was bustling about, humming tunelessly as she emptied the dishwasher.

“You’re still hungry?” Andrew asked.

“I don’t know,” Neil said. “But I really want more sandwiches.”

Andrew pulled out his notebook and opened it to a new page. He wrote Neil’s name at the top and started a bullet list, but one of the cats he’d drawn the day before tiptoed across it, leaving an inky paw print trail in its wake.

“So you’ve never had a body, but you can speak, walk and eat,” Andrew summarised out loud instead. “What else can you do?”

Neil shrugged, which was apparently another thing he could do.

“Lots of things,” he said mysteriously. “Using my hands is still pretty new, though.”

He picked up the salt shaker to demonstrate and promptly spilled it all over the table. Andrew managed to push his hot chocolate out of the danger zone just in time and raised an eyebrow at him.

“Told you I’m still learning,” Neil grinned. There was rather an impressive amount of teeth in his mouth, though he didn’t give Andrew time to count them.

“You’re already proficient at being a nuisance, nothing left to learn there,” Andrew pointed out, thinking of all the incidents and messes he’d had to clean up after lately.

“Beats the dreadful agony of existing.” Neil shrugged again. “Your cousin is very entertaining when he screams.”

“Only if you don’t have eardrums.”

“You, on the other hand, were not very entertaining at all,” Neil complained, tilting his head to the side. “All you ever do is sleep and dig up worms. Don’t even get me started on the moss you’re growing. Did you know there’s like, billions of tons of that exact same moss in the forest? And it’s just as boring as the one in your room.”

“You could have moved on to a more entertaining target any time,” Andrew said.

“Yeah,” Neil said. “I guess I could have.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Don’t know,” Neil hummed thoughtfully. “Being around you was marginally less awful than the other alternatives.”

The words tasted sour in Andrew’s mouth, like juice that had started to ferment. He washed them down with the last of his hot chocolate.

“Besides, I was curious what you were going to do with the stolen body parts.”

Neil lifted his hand, closed his fingers into a fist and opened them again, watching the tendons in his wrist move.

“They were donated to science,” Andrew said dismissively. “It’s not like the original owners still had use for them.”

“I’m not science,” Neil argued, trying to bend each of his fingers independently of the others and failing.

“No,” Andrew agreed, trying to come up with an appropriate word. “You’re…”

“Hungry,” Neil decided. “I think I’m hungry.”

-

Andrew probably should have realised that Nicky would be upset about him spending the night elsewhere without letting him know. Cell phone reception was spotty in Blackwood at the best of times, but the truth was that Andrew had completely forgotten that there was someone who cared about whether or not he came home at night now.

A towering stack of cold waffles and Nicky’s red-rimmed eyes greeted him in the kitchen, along with several sad, empty coffee mugs that Nicky must have gone through while waiting up for him.

“Oh, thank god,” Nicky breathed, wringing his hands. He was evidently too exhausted to launch into his usual speech about family and obligations and whatever. Small blessings.

“This is Neil,” Andrew said quickly, in case the speech was still coming. “He’s a supernatural being who’s been haunting this town in general and our cottage in particular. I performed an occult ritual to trap him inside a makeshift body last night so he’d stop causing mayhem, but now he keeps following me around and demanding food.”

Nicky rolled his eyes, though it wasn’t quite with the usual fervour.

“Really, Andrew…”

“Hello, Nicky,” Neil said. “Can I have a waffle?”

Nicky blinked like he’d forgotten about the waffles.

“I- of course,” he stammered, caught off-guard. “Do you want- let me get you some syrup, you’re such a skinny thing…”

He launched himself at the pantry, wondering where the syrup bottle had gone (Andrew’s room) and why the jar of honey Erik had brought last week was already empty again and still in the pantry (because Andrew had needed it for a spell, and because Aaron had a habit of absent-mindedly putting empty jars and bottles back into the pantry and fridge, so Andrew did it too if he needed someone else to blame).

By the time Nicky was back with a bottle of chocolate sauce Neil had already inhaled half of the waffles. Andrew grabbed one just so Nicky wouldn’t fuss about him and watched as Nicky fretfully searched for something to do, finally settling on making a pot of tea.

“You could have just called me and let me know you were staying with a friend, you know,” Nicky sniffed, setting the pot down on the table. He jumped up again almost right away to pour a healthy splash of whisky into his cup, muttering about needing something to steady his nerves. Andrew eyed the bottle with interest and made a mental note of the cupboard Nicky placed it in—it was too high for him to reach, but if he climbed onto the counter…

“Well, I’m glad _someone_ likes my ginger waffles,” Nicky said, shooting a bemused look at Neil who was picking up the last crumbs.

“Do you have any sandwiches?” Neil asked hopefully.

“No more sandwiches,” Andrew interrupted. “Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

“I’ve seen your room, it’s boring,” Neil scoffed. “I’d rather stay where there’s food.”

“You need a bath,” Andrew insisted, eyeing the dirt on Neil’s still-bare feet and the smear of chocolate sauce on his chin. There was a clatter on the stairs and Aaron swung into the kitchen, hair sticking up on one side and jacket buttoned up wrong.

“Has anyone seen my spare scrubs? My shift starts in ten.”

“Must be in the laundry,” Andrew said nonchalantly.

“Didn’t I just do laundry?” Nicky groaned. Aaron had caught sight of Neil, who was licking chocolate sauce off his fingers and definitely still wearing his spare pair of scrubs, but Andrew managed to grab him and pull him out of the room before Aaron’s brain could compute this fact.

“Can I get the fun bubble kind at least?” Neil asked once Andrew had closed the bathroom door behind them and was riffling through the cupboards. Nicky had a box of fancy perfumed bath bombs that Andrew wrinkled his nose at, but he found a bottle of some woodsy-smelling oil in the back and emptied the lot into the bathwater, pleased when it started frothing at once.

“Oh, I like that, smells like my forest,” Neil said, stepping into the tub fully clothed and immediately submerging himself head to toe. Andrew had to pull him out and explain about breathing, which Neil didn’t seem too bothered by, opting instead to flick foam at Andrew.

“What did you mean by your forest?” Andrew asked, glaring down at his damp sweater. He had planned to just leave Neil to soak and figure out what the hell he was going to do with him later, but now he didn’t quite trust Neil not to drown himself by accident. Which might have solved the problem of Neil, but would have rendered last night’s efforts pointless.

“Just that,” Neil shrugged. “It’s my forest. I was here first.”

“First as in you were here before Blackwood existed?”

“Uhuh. It was even more boring before that. I don’t really remember.”

He frowned down at his wet clothes and yanked at the fabric. Before Andrew could stop him, he’d torn the shirt in half and was humming as he peeled the ruined garment off his skin and dropped it over the side of the tub.

“No,” Andrew told him when he reached for the trousers, “no more ripping. Pull them off like a normal fucking person.”

“I’m not a normal person and the only fucking I do is fucking around,” Neil said cheerfully, but started to wriggle and splash about in the water in a strange mimicry of someone removing their pants. In the end, Andrew had to reach in and help him again, and Neil peered contemplatively at his crotch.

“Suppose I could try now I’ve got one of these,” he said, sounding amused. “It always looked very complicated though. More complicated than putting on clothes.”

“Let’s stick with putting on clothes for now,” Andrew said hastily and scooped up two handfuls of foam to dump on Neil’s head. Neil squawked, then laughed as Andrew started scrubbing at his hair, suds and rivulets of dirty water dripping down his face. He still had too many teeth, but considering the stuff Andrew had used to make his body, it could have been a lot worse.

Andrew quietly disposed of the ripped shirt and put the rest in the wash, then helped Neil towel himself dry, which was a lot like trying to towel one of Bee’s cats dry when they came in out of the rain. He put Neil in a pair of jeans and a thick hoodie that wouldn’t rip as easily, deposited him in his room with the promise of more sandwiches if he stayed put, and took a quick turn in the bathroom himself before assembling the promised food.

“Teenage boys,” Nicky sighed woefully, watching Andrew pile a plate with a haphazard combination of sandwiches, apple slices, chips and rice krispies treats. “You know, I think this is the first time you’ve brought a friend over. He seems nice, is he staying for dinner?”

“Don’t know,” Andrew said. “Though if there’s food, probably.”

“I’ll make a cottage pie, then,” Nicky hummed. “Better make that two. Apple crumble for dessert? Yes, that should do nicely… Maybe Erik will want to come over, too… I’d better pop into the market and get more potatoes.”

Andrew left him to it and returned upstairs, where he found Neil fast asleep in a pile of bedding that he’d dragged onto the floor. He looked much cleaner and smaller than he had before his bath, though his body seemed to be around the same age as Andrew, and the snores he made sounded like they belonged to a giant.

Andrew ate a few chips and rice krispies treats from the plate, studying Neil as he slept. Then he took out his notebook, found a spare blanket and climbed on his bed, writing down a list of questions and issues to pursue the next day, like whether Nicky would get suspicious if Neil just never left. Compiling the list made him sleepy, and he ended up dozing off himself to the sounds of Neil’s ragged breathing, Nicky’s faint music coming from downstairs and the restless creaking of the cottage around him.

**Author's Note:**

> [here's the tumblr post](https://annawrites.tumblr.com/post/187881881714/chapters-11-fandom-all-for-the-game-nora) with a moodboard for this fic. if you like my stuff, subscribe to me or this series or follow me on tumbr or just let me know by leaving ominous messages in the comments, ta


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